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Format : Hardback, 192 pages

Published in : United States, 02 April 1999

Ziwi Points : 92 points Currently valued at $0.92

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This is an impressionistic account of the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition, a sea voyage during which leading naturalists spent two months exploring the Southeastern shoreline of Alaska. Almost one hundred years later Alaskan Nancy Lord retraces Harrimans steps, seeking to understand this centurys attitudes toward nature, landscape, and culture.. In 1899 the Harriman Alaska Expedition assembled a company of exceptional characters--the nature writers John Burroughs and John Muir, photographer Edward Curtis, scientist William Dall, conservationist and ethnographer George Bird Grinnell, bird artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, geologist Henry Gannett, and others. They cruised glacial fjords, collected specimens, and photographed Alaskas native people. Nearly a hundred years later, Nancy Lord, an Alaskan well-rooted in coastal life and commercial fishing, revisits many of the same stops made by the earlier expedition. At salmon canneries and fox farm islands, on mountaintops and in the big silences, Green Alaska takes us on a contemplative ride across a century of American attitudes toward wild landscapes, resource development, and culture.Green Alaska offers powerful insight into an environment in flux. Harrimans expedition was romantic, but the railroad tycoon was also looking for exploitable economic opportunity. Lord brings her fine eye to that historic journey by retracing much of the same wild Alaska shoreline from the pilothouse of a modern salmon tender. She visits a cannery where imported Chinese laborers once wielded their knives, then boards a modern processing ship turning salmon into frozen product. She witnesses whales and whalers, experiences the acculturation of Alaskas natives, and passes time with a family living in the last house on the contiguous North American continent. Sharing her exploration of coastal Alaska in an eloquent, fluid prose style, Nancy Lord writes a definitive work on Americas forty-ninth state. In 1899 Edward Harriman, the railroad tycoon and most powerful man in America, assembled an elite crew of scientists and artists and took them on a two month survey of the Alaskan coast. Its 126 members included mountaineer John Muir, nature writer John Burroughs, biologist C.Hart Merriam, naturalist and Alaskan expert William Dall, bird artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, ornithologist George Bird Grinnell, and photographer Edward Curtis. The expedition returned with one hundred trunks of specimens and over 5000 photographs and colored illustrations. The scientists produced thirteen volumes of data that took twelve years to compile. The expedition captured an environment in flux. This luxury liners trip was romantic, but Harriman was also looking for exploitable economic opportunity.Almost one hundred years later Nancy Lord travels by boat along some of the same shoreline. Green Alaska concerns itself with the attitudes that shaped the earlier journey, as well as the landscape and culture of Americas farthest reach. In clear and original prose, Lord questions what is universal in the contemplation of great outdoor spaces, and explores the unique and sometimes unforgiving aspects of life in Alaska.